Currently in order to scale Noise I just divide or multiply the incoming position, but since Noise has all sorts of applications it would be nice to not have to create extra nodes every time for a simple control. Could we add a Scale spinner to the Noise node for simpler setups?

I guess it depends on if you adhere to the Unix philosophy of "Make each program do one thing well".

Maybe what would solve the problem better would be to add the ability to build your own component groups. For example, "make a Noise node connected to a scale node with value X". That way you could build a tool library of arbitrarily complex nodes you could re-use on your projects.

The original design intention of Magma was to keep the operators as simple and atomic as possible, and let the user connect multiple operators to produce mode complex behaviors. There are some complex operators like in the Object (or Stoke) categories, but the majority are rather simple. I am unsure it is a good idea to make some of them more complex if there is already an easy way to achieve the same result with one or two more nodes connected to them.

But I will discuss your wish with the developers and see what they think...

eamsler wrote:Maybe what would solve the problem better would be to add the ability to build your own component groups. For example, "make a Noise node connected to a scale node with value X". That way you could build a tool library of arbitrarily complex nodes you could re-use on your projects.

Not crazy at all, that's what BLOPs compound operators are for. One could make a Noise with Scale and Scale Output controls and package it as a single node. However, it would show up under the BLOP category rather than Function category. One can make a sub-folder in the BLOPs storage folder called "Noise" and create various compounds with different behaviors. They would then appear under BLOP>Noise...

This does not reduce the number of internal operators in the flow, but it will simplify the flow itself from the user's point of view. Adding more operators to Magma is not a bad idea, it is actually supposed to improve multi-threaded performance.